HDD

Don’t throw out or resell that old server, hard disk drive, or solid state drive just yet: unless you’ve taken the proper precautions to ensure the data is unrecoverable, you could be putting your business and personal information at risk of theft. A recent study of storage devices resold on Craigslist found that a staggering 67% still contained personal information and 11% contained business information. This study highlights the importance of making sure your company’s old storage devices are properly cleared before disposal or resale.Read More

Faster and less-expensive solid state drives stand to change the mechanical storage expectations of the modern data center. Current connection standards are creating a performance bottleneck that is unable to keep pace with SSD speed gains. To combat this problem, storage device manufacturers are looking at new ways of connecting storage devices to computer systems.Read More

Researchers at Rutgers University found that humidity, not heat, is the single greatest detriment to a hard disk drive’s lifespan in a recently published HDD reliability study. This revised understanding of the ideal conditions for prolonging HDD longevity has the potential to change how data centers manage environmental conditions. The study examined one million HDDs across nine data centers over a period of 18 months to four years for each center. HDD failure is by far the most common hardware failure type at data centers, being responsible for 76 to 95 percent of all component failures. Not only can HDD failures mean lost data, but they also can add up in costs to replace. Read More

Almost every modern hard drive comes with a feature that can help your staff preempt many device failures. Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, or S.M.A.R.T. is a handy tool for keeping an eye on hard drive health in both data center and terminal environments. S.M.A.R.T. collects data to observe the performance of the motors, disk platters, read/write heads, and other device electronics. The HDD uses that information to compare against performance degradation trends that indicate imminent device failure.Read More

A new approach to constructing solid state drive technology is chipping away at advantages formerly held by hard disc drives. Up until 2016, computers and servers could get more in storage from a traditional hard disc drive than a solid state drive when accounting for the physical size of the device. According to Forbes this is no longer the case, as manufacturers can now build flash memory storage devices that store more data in less space than a traditional hard drive. However, should your data center immediately exchange all of its existing HDDs for SSDs? Most likely not.Read More

A February 2016 class action lawsuit argues that one manufacturer is responsible for selling hard drives that failed at a rate substantially higher than the industry average. The lawsuit targets HDD manufacturer Seagate over a 3TB model, arguing that the replacement of failed drives with the same model was inadequate in fulfilling warranty obligations because the failure rates on the replacement drives were so high. The lawsuit cites information from cloud storage provider Backblaze which claims the 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 failed at a staggeringly high 43.1% annual rate. Within three years only 68% of the drives Backblaze installed were still operational.Read More

Solid State Drives, as a data storage option, offer incredible gains in access speed over traditional Hard Disk Drives, but flash-based storage is still a long way off from completely replacing disk-based storage in data centers. While SSD technology continues to improve and prices are falling quickly, manufacturers are also making incredible advances in traditional Hard Disk Drive development. The HDD advances are far more applicable to large-scale data storage operations including data centers and cloud services because of the sheer massive amounts of data they can store at a comparatively inexpensive rate. Read More

After a major technology upgrade like a data center move or replacing company computers, your business may acquire a large number of decommissioned data storage devices loaded with confidential information. Instead of leaving the HDDs and SSDs in your unused systems around as an accident waiting to happen, the proactive choice is to make sure the data stored on those devices is no longer accessible.Read More

The performance improvements solid state drives have over hard disk drives make the flash-based storage devices sound like an ideal upgrade for your business’ data center. However, the speed boost you experience when you swap out the HDD with a SSD on your personal computer may not translate into the same positive experience on a server. Read More